Lenses feature allegedly coming to Windows Phone 7.8 too

Although nothing official has been announced yet for Windows Phone 7.8, we’re certainly hearing a lot more about that pending update these days. The latest information states that current users will get the ‘Lenses’ feature of Windows Phone 8.

The information comes via a Google Hangout that was held recently with David Akinjise, Product Manager at Nokia and picked up by the site WPArea.de. There he revealed that the Lenses feature along with Cinemagraph and Smart Shoot will be coming to current Nokia Lumia phones in the near future.

Lenses are similar to mini-apps for the Camera module, where programs can be activated while readying to take a photo. Not only do they make photos more creative they give “live” views of whatever changes they are designed to do. So instead of having to find the app in your App list and then post-process the picture, you can do it all at once.

So far, there has been a limited selection of Lenses for Windows Phone 8, including CNN’s iReport and Nokia’s Cinemagraph, Smart Shoot and Panorama. A Windows Phone 8 version of PhotoSynth is around the corner (we’ve used it ourselves) and presumably other programs will be getting the treatment as well. From our experience, Lenses really are quite useful as the take some of thing thinking out of taking photos.

Cinemagraph and Smart Shoot are Nokia creations with the former creating animated GIFs from a series of rapidly shot photos and letting the user select which areas to animate. Smart Shoot works by identifying moving objects in a frame and letting the user selectively erase unwanted figures.

If Akinjise's statement turns out to be accurate, current Windows Phone users should get quite a nice update in the next few months to make parity a little more realistic between the two OSs.